Project: OO

We are doing this project in Bforartists and UE4, so thought to share.

We are doing 2D rigs hybrds, but this here is a 3D rig to propose to the client and gauge production costs.

It's a 1 minute animation with a bunch of characters. Should be fun.

A thing i did to the default theme is put an animation toolbar to the bottom, so when I switch views, I have the same timeline controls + some that are needed - without needing two animation views that feel disjointed. I can also opt to a simple collapsed dopesheet with the toolbar timeline ontrols and upgrade the timeline and give my artists what they are used to - keyframes that can be moved on the timeline.

Rigging is fun when it works. I find Bforartists makes some tools easier and more accessible than what I was using in Blender. I also learnt that Rclick+Copy to Selected to copy attributes from the Active Selection to all the others. I hope they change this (that this does this automatically), but phew, I can save work finally doing this.

My team is growing and working well, it's great to work a team and share the load, produce work quicker. I like collaboration.

Finished the default rig for the characters. I tried to make a rotation gimic for the 2D aspects, but not today.. running out of time.

Notes:
For the experimental keymap where F is focus, the weight painting needs radius and focus at the same time, but moving radius to R conclicts with typical scale. I will have to investigate why it's there and if that can be mitigated - other than that, no other conflict for R radius and F focus - here and the GP scale that is..

The tools in the toolshelf are nice and relaxing. To be honest I've resorted to less hotkeys to move cursor to object, then object to cursor. The toolshelf has replaced it naturally, am I lazy!? haha

The mouth probably would have saved me more time with a spline rig - but I was afraid the export to UE4 wouldn't export that.... so I did normal weight, but it's dirty. Weight painting in Blender/BFA sucks to be honest. You can't see all rig weights (softimage style to get a general overview of all bone weights with their unique colours) and you can't change weight transparency (to paint weights while seeing where textures are) - but the rig smooth feature helps. Those tools also in the toolshelf help.

For the experimental keymap where F is focus, the weight painting needs radius and focus at the same time, but moving radius to R conclicts with typical scale. I will have to investigate why it's there and if that can be mitigated - other than that, no other conflict for R radius and F focus - here and the GP scale that is..

I hope you find a solution here. But as this example shows, you can easily trap yourself by just changing one hotkey. That's why it's a much better approach to solve such changes at a one by one base in a experimental keymap. And migrate the working changes to the official keymaps then.

Finally, I have a character personalized to my default rig, a rig I build for everyone to then copy/modify to the custom characters - in hopes that animation can be shared and the rigging process done quickly.

The rigging took a little longer than expected - due to the hard knees, I needed the feet to flip - also not sure how to make secondary animation auto rigs with tails, I found an example, but required rigid body setups. Still unfamiliar, and running out of time. But in general, the rig is working.

I will now test an export to UE4.

Notes:

BFA is great, but still needs a lot of digging in the internet to find tutorials/material. If the software came with a good example DLC that you can download separately for example content - packaged and built for BFA, that would appeal to many artists who want to start up and do cool things. I guess with time.......

Upgraded to 0.9.7 without a hiccup. The extra icons in dropdown menus are super helpful. I never thought I'd need them till they were there. The new sculpting/texturing cleanups have me excited. Just need a project to use them.

I hope we could integrate Tex Tools one day... they have icons and great UV tools built right in. Very well thought out. Another day..at the moment I just share work, no tracker issues.

Note.. Tick boxes are irritating. I prefer buttons that toggle, pressed/unpressed. It saves realestate and is easier to see/read/interpret than scrunched incomplete words and a tick box that is ambigious.. everywhere - I like the condensing of BFA, but the side by side tickboxes with cut words/letters... if it's going to be tooltips, best it be an iconbutton toggle? I'm curious to know how to change this - if it's possible in panels, toolbars, etc. Not sure if I should file this in the tracker..

I found a bunch of options that could toggle to be hidden under the check boxes in the UI. I did not take mental note where they were, now in work/crunch time.

I finished redesigning my business model. I had my programmer on hold due to not being sure what my budget really was. Now I do. Maybe May may be a bit better to delegate work. I do want to find someone who can compile though, or build an autocompiler system somewhow - a dumbed down one for BFA and my needs.

Found out BFA/Blender can run with the new depsgraph already. I wonder if it's buggy.

Draise, you can report everything. We will then see and discuss in the tracker if the issue is manageable and useful

Checkboxes. There are hundrets in the software. And not all are changeable to icon buttons. Most of them needs a name to be displayed. And then a checkbox makes more sense. But i love the idea of icon toggle buttons too. There is still the plan to put some of the most used viewport toggles into the toolbar, or at least into the header. I am just not sure if this will happen in the current development cycle. As you know, they merge the Blender 2.8 branch into the master in the next few days. Which ends the 2.79x development cycle.

Do we really need a special Bforartists file repository? Bforartists loads Blend files just fine. There is Blend Swap for example, with tons of example files.

I posted it to the gallery. It was fun and great to do it with Bforartists.I had an export bug with the FBX because of the 4 vertex influences per vertice limit in unreal Engine and the diffictul weight painting system of Blender in general that stopped me from rendering this in Unreal Engine - but other than that it worked. We rendered this out with a mix of the Game Engine settings and the OpenGL viewport.

Thanks for all the fixes and updates to the RC for 1.0.0 that got this out on time! Clients were very happy.